Design Decisions - Part 1
written by Timelord
on June 9, 2010
One of the primary concerns with any custom module is to judge how far a character will progress in that module - what is the optimum level range that a player will end up at? What sort of skills will be used in the module? Will there be redundant skills or talents that a player will never find a use for?
For Blood and Lyrium (and the game, in general), I felt some of the skill trees were redundant or tacked on or just plain unusable given the module design (more about this in the next post).
For example, we have an entire skill tree dedicated to making traps. However, only the rogue gets the necessary talents to disarm traps. This seemed illogical to me - if a person is skilled enough to put together complex traps, shouldn't he be able to take part those same traps? Or at least simple ones?
The other thing that bugged me was stealing. I am a big fan of improving skills as you use them a lot and stealing is a prime candidate for this. How can a warrior in heavy armor and wielding a great sword (especially, one of those ridiculously big swords in the game!) steal successfully from anyone other than a dead person? And unless you had a Fagin to 'mentor' you, how can you just become better at stealing?
In my module, there will be just one skill each for Stealing and Trap Mastery. That's right - Trap Mastery. The player will be able to both construct and disarm traps using this one skill. Trap and stealing difficulty will be handled via Cunning and Dexterity as primary modifiers and armor/weapons as secondary modifiers.
Combat Tactics will also completely disappear from the skill list. The player will be given a set of slots at the beginning of the game and that's it. I am toying with the idea of purchasing additional tactics slots by undergoing training from select mentors but it would have to fit in with the whole story to make something like that work.
I am not completely happy with the way the skill tree turned out, though. I will probably get in touch with FollowTheGourd on the Bioware forums to see if he has any idea to hide the empty squares and arrows.
...and lastly, a short update on the level design progress. My RAM started throwing errors and causing random BSoDs so I had to RMA it. While I am waiting for a replacement kit, I am stuck working on my laptop which means less level building. I have been using this time to finish up some of the 2DA and scripting work required and also writing up more of the story so it hasn't been a complete waste of time!
More on design decisions for Blood and Lyrium in the next post!